By: Paige Rohe

The latest threat to American shores does not involve dirty bombs, or even French products. It is a virus called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.  Believed to have originated in Southeast Asia, SARS has only proved deadly for approximately 1% of those infected (susceptibility to complications from SARS usually the result of other mitigating health conditions such as Diabetes and Heart Disease). The rest of those sickened have recovered with proper medical care. However, people in the US, despite the frequent number of travelers arriving on our shores from infected areas every day, has managed to stave off an outbreak of its own. People still wring their wrists with worry, because CNN and Fox News tell us that nobody’s sure just how contagious this pathogen is.

The West Nile virus that terrified Americans last summer is another case of the media’s taste for morbid sensationalism. The bug only sickened 20% of those bitten by infected mosquitoes, and of that number less than one percent suffered severe complications from the disease. 

Therefore, there's really no point in tossing and turning in your beds at night over these two issues. SARS is far away and it's being contained. Americans will eventually develop immunity to West Nile, if they are sickened from it in the first place, and everything will be honky-dory. It's about time we focused our freak-out energies on far more serious health threats, like the possibility that someone, somewhere has got Anthrax or Smallpox, and they want to use it against us.

Smallpox wasn’t just some sick military scientist’s laboratory concoction. It was a real disease, which plagued mankind for thousands of years, before its eradication only a few decades ago.

Thanks to worldwide vaccination efforts on the part of the CDC and the World Health Organization, Smallpox only exists in test tubes now at the CDC and in Russia. Or so we think.

Let’s face it, the Russians can’t even manage to keep up with a few of their old missiles.  Are we really to trust that they are still the only other owners of one of the worst plagues of humankind? And if they aren’t, is it time to panic?

No. We can let President Bush and Condi Rice do that for us. After all, isn’t our war in Iraq about big, bad, and nasty biological weapons of mass destruction? How many thousands of liters of Anthrax did President Bush accuse Saddam Hussein of not owing up to? Too many.

Iraq may not have a reliable power grid, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t own sophisticated biological weapons. It’s enough to make me want to bury my head in a copy of Chicken Soup for the Paranoid Soul and read the world away.

However, there is some truth to the idea that despite Iraq’s poverty, it is possible to underestimate what Saddam Hussein’s cache of biological weapons may be. Just a week before the attack on the World Trade Center in September of 2001, the New York Times announced that the Pentagon had recently developed and completed a program to determine the bare minimum amount of equipment, expertise and expense required to make enough bio-toxins to become a threat.

According to the widely read daily, government officials had underestimated the skill and machinery necessary for a terrorist to manufacture a germ-bomb: “Experts [had] assembled a germ factory in the Nevada desert from commercially available materials…[demonstrating] the ease with which a terrorist or rogue nation could build a plant that could produce pounds of the deadly germs” (Miller et all, 9/4/01).

So forget dirty bombs. All a terrorist really has to do is infect himself with a really vicious air-born bug, sneak onto a crowded subway car and breathe.

Does this mean we should stop taking public transportation? Wear masks whenever we leave our homes? Vaccinate our children for every disease from Smallpox to the Bubonic Plague?

No. The truth is, just as in the Age of Smallpox, we’re at a greater risk for someone accidentally bringing something terrible to our shores than we are for it to happen purposefully.

The ease of international travel means that any germ from anywhere in the world could reach American shores within 24 to 48 hours. It could infect thousands before its even detected and might not have a cure. Sure, it may not require much to make lots of biological weapons. But where are you going to get the sample of that big bad and nasty from in the first place?

Even before the attacks of September and October 2001, you couldn’t just take Anthrax out of the jungle, put it in an envelope, send it across the Atlantic and successfully infect letter-openers in America.

Yet millions around the world are suffering from diseases that are horrific and deadly. Just this week, the CDC’s website for International Travelers had several travel warnings listed, advising travelers of outbreaks of Ebola, Yellow Fever, Meningococcal disease, and SARS. What if someone got on a plane bound for America with Ebola?

West Nile proved that despite our status as a First World nation, we are not immune to the establishment of new diseases among our population.  What pestilence awaits arrival or will resurface in the United States next?

Antibiotic-resistant strains of Tuberculosis are present as close by as South America. But does anybody in this country, other than public health practitioners, know about it? I guess a bunch of poor people dying from a disease because they can't afford proper medical care isn't quite sensationalist enough for our ratings-hungry news stations.

So far, thanks largely to the efforts of the CDC and other, international health organizations, Ebola isn’t usually a part of the vocabulary of American healthcare workers. As for SARS, if it hadn’t been for the CDC and the World Health Organization working with Southeast Asian public health officials, the illness could have spread even farther and wider than we could ever imagine: all without the help of Osama Bin Laden.

There are two kinds of bioterror: the terror wreaked by the use of a biological weapon of mass destruction upon innocents or members of the military, and the incidental, more everyday, terror experienced by those of the Third World who suffer from outbreaks of the world's worst diseases.

We ought to be concerned about both, however, we must be careful not to focus on one at the expense of the other. Millions of dollars are being spent on the reproduction of the Smallpox vaccine, a disease no one on earth has actually come down with in decades. Millions of people are dying from Tuberculosis, almost ignored by the international community. If we have the capability to help these sufferers, we have the moral imperative to do so.

After all, it is more likely that the real threat to Americans and the rest of the world may, in fact, come from Mother Earth, herself, rather than an underground network of terrorists. While we’re beefing up budgets for the Office of Homeland Security, we ought to also give more support to the efforts of the CDC to help stave outbreaks of deadly pathogens around the world.  At the rate we're going, we may certainly one day rid ourselves of terrorists. But without the same kind of commitment, we may never rid ourselves of the threat of disease.

Paige Rohe is an International Studies student at Emory University and a contributing writer for PurePolitics.com. She can be reached at feedback@purepolitics.com.

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